Data Acquisition Platform for The Energy Management of Smart Factories and Buildings

Abstract

With the rise of energy consumption, especially in the manufacturing sector, energy management systems are being developed to increase the energy efficiency of smart buildings and factories. These energy management systems are able to derive energy consumption parameters and visualize environmental data collected from a data acquisition platform. Internet of Things (loT) technologies can be used to acquire this data, but will face challenges in industrial settings-lack of cyber secure communication, poor scalability, and minimal back-end functionality are to name a few. This paper presents a data acquisition platform for industrial energy management that combats these loT challenges. The implemented platform utilizes the Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol to establish fast and simple communication between constrained loT devices. A home automation platform called open Home Automation Bus (openHAB) is utilized as an integration platform due to its balance between functionality and user experience. However, since openHAB does not offer end-to-end payload encryption for MQTT, a method of secure communication to and from openHAB is developed using AES-128 and XChaCha20 algorithms. To improve loT scalability, a method of dynamic sensor configuration is also developed, which mitigates open-HAB configuration time. Finally, though many databases are supported, Influx Database (InfluxDB) is integrated alongside openHAB to collect and analyze sensor data. The study concludes that the implemented system provides a data acquisition platform with sensor data storage and secure communication for easy integration and use in buildings or smart factories.